Sometimes I stay up late – really late. I’m so tired my eyes water but I force myself to stay up, distracting myself with nonsense.
It hurts, and I hate it, but it’s a hard habit to break. When I get squirrelly in the evening, I know it’s going to be one of those nights no matter what I tell myself. It is going to be a night where fight my better nature, and stay up late.
I’ve thought a lot about why I do this, because honestly if it were just about nerves I could take an AdvilPM and get to sleep. I’ve done that enough to know it works, and it is an easy way to jump over a bundle of worries and fears.
This is different, though. This happens when I don’t want to wake up.
Not in the sense that I never want to wake up, but rather, I don’t want to face the next day. It is irrationality squared and I think it is leftover from some childish logic I developed as a young girl: if today never ends, tomorrow won’t happen.
So I stay up until I’m literally falling asleep in my chair, until I can’t coordinate my eye-hand movements enough to click squares in Bejeweled. I know what I’m doing, but that doesn’t stop me from pulling up the next web page, the next fanfic, the next game.
It’s never worked, though. Tomorrow always shows up. The reason I’ve hated tomorrow is rarely because I was worried about it, or scared of what might happen. That kind of nervousness I can deal with by talking myself down or, as I said, just taking a sleeping pill. Once I’m past the initial panic, everything is back to normal.
What will keep me up all night is knowing that tomorrow is going to be exactly the same as today – that anything I do is pointless, and whatever I try will be undermined or fail outright. It’s a mind-numbing resignation that nothing changes, that nothing gets better, which is one of the most hopeless feelings I’ve ever experienced. Face my fears? No problem, line ‘em up! Face an unchanging fate of worthlessness? I’ll never go to sleep.
It is happening less and less these days, though. More often I think about what I want to accomplish, even if it doesn’t change anything. I think maybe I was too focused on the concept of change itself, about how much I wanted things to be different, instead of thinking about what I wanted to do that is personally satisfying.
Desperation has never solved any problems for me, and it has never alleviated the sameness that drained my heart and soul and will to live. No, what desperation lacks is hope. I needed hope before I could believe that tomorrow is worth going to sleep for, and hope is not born out of desperation. Hope emerges after asking a lot of questions and spend time trying to figure out the answers; sure, desperation is part of that process (it’s how I ended up in therapy to begin with) but it does not give hope. Desperation is a plea for external solutions; hope is something we create for ourselves.
I still stay up late sometimes. I can’t help it, when a day has been long and stressful. I don’t want another day like that, and I’m scared I’m back sliding into the Dark Ages. But those days are fewer, and even those nights are shorter. Some days, I even look forward to what the next day will bring.
